Thanks for Gatecrashing!

Welcome to this page. It’s where I’ll post material to make up my first novel, codenamed ‘The Gatecrasher’ – I have a far sexier title in mind but I’ve decided to hold that back, you know, just in case…

So where do you come in to all this? Well, I’ve never written a novel before so I thought I’d make the process something of a live experiment. Here’s why…

Eventually when it’s written (?), I’ll want to be able to pitch it to someone with a view to actually getting it put on real paper and sold in real shops (websites would also be fine) but here’s the thing: speak to any aspiring writer – or any published writer, for that matter – and they all seem to say how impossibly impenetrable the publishing world is. Then, came along crowdfunding initiatives like Unbound, which you would think helped but in reality, seemed simply to woo the realistic first-time writers, giving even more justification to the traditional publishers’ view that new material must be avoided.

Like film, popular music and lots of other areas where art has become an industry, books seem to require ‘proven winners’ like JK Rowling in order to survive. That’s the same JK Rowling who couldn’t get a book deal after years of pitching the story that was to form one of literature’s greatest-ever commercial successes. I’m not comparing my work with hers but if ‘Harry Potter and the Unwilling Publisher’ was a drama seemingly doomed to an ignominious, anonymous ending for so many chapters, what hope do the rest of us have? It seems to me that the only way to get around the gatekeepers to mainsteam acceptance, penetrating the kind of inclusivity that Decca exuded when they told the Beatles that “guitar bands are on the way out” is to build one’s own appeal.

Hopefully, you’ll like what I’ve written (okay, what I’m still writing) enough to recommend it to a friend. If that happens again and again, it’s a far easier path to paper publishing than any amount of conjecture or mere promise.